RIP, GeoCities

Today, October 26, 2009, marks the last day of Yahoo! GeoCities, the host, uh, thingie that was home to many an amateur and now-obsolete website. I've spent the the last two days, and in particular the last two hours and 45 minutes tonight, downloading every webpage, graphic and picture from my "Waste Of Space" site. On September 25, 1998 (it says so right on my File Manager page), I officially began my presence on the Internet by taking all the stuff I created way back in my junior year for a class I took and threw it onto what was supposed to be the Next Big Thing In Cyberspace. And it was huge and innovative ... for 1998.

Does anybody remember creating a webpage? They were then what facebook is now -- online outlets to express yourself, share your hobbies, post pictures about yourself, interact with friends, and maybe find someone new (hopefully one who wasn't a pedophile). I remember that GeoCities gave me an update (weekly? Monthly?) showcasing other webpages. I had my own URL. I even was given a number that was my address; I could click on a graphic "map" showing my webpage manifested as a house and see my "neighbors." I didn't have too many neighbors then. I lived in an exurb.

However, I have to admit I didn't take too much care of my webpage. The big project I had on my "Waste Of Space" was "The E-Mail Forward Archive." Remember when you checked your e-mail and your friends would send you these funny forwards that get passed around? Well, I thought it'd be just so kewl if I put them in HTML form and preserve them on my webpage. (Do college students get forwards anymore? Maybe it's a '90's thing.) I moved as many forwards as I could before I got into space issues with my Hotmail account. (Remember when you had space limitations in your inbox? I think all of them went to unlimited about five years ago, but limited mail space seems like a '90's thing too.) And I remember a few days when I would go to a lab at the U. (when I still had access because I was a student) and spending several hours "treating" them with HTML so they were webpage-ready. Even though I haven't looked at how many forwards I got around to putting up on my site (the others were in my account, I just didn't post them), I don't remember even doing those since, uh, at least 2001, possibly even 1998.

The only thing I did update on my website was this little quote I had on the bottom of my welcome/splash page. When I "designed" my "Waste Of Space" I wanted any viewers I had to be able to look forward to something new every day they went to it. I had a Franklin Quest where each page day had a little saying. I don't think I was breaking any copyrights, so I posted that day's quote and the author on my index page. I used to be religious about it, but after seeing the stats that no one was looking at my website (thereby putting a lie to the adage that everybody gets famous on the Internet -- wait, maybe it was just me who said that), I stopped caring so much. GeoCities says I last updated it on August 6. I'll update it now to see if I can do it.

I did it! Surprised, because by all accounts they were determined to shut it down today. I couldn't take the chance they'd do it as soon as possible, so that's why, after taking a pork- and champagne-induced nap over Sunday Night Football (how the hell did the Giants lose to the Cardinals?) I feverishly finished taking all my stuff onto my desktop for later transfer somewhere else. Honestly, if they did shut and delete my site while I was in the middle of it, I wouldn't've sweated it too much. After all, the Entertainment Weekly that I laid on top of a wet ring made by my Grandmother's cup is still drying behind me, but I'm not as pissed off about it when I blogged about it last night. How mad could I be if I hadn't tended to any but one page of my small-to-medium-sized in over a decade, and the page I did tend to in over two months? This might be another in my very long list of Project I've Been Meaning To Do But Never Get Around To. Those dreams are why I have so many papers still in my room -- I'll get to reading them, all of them, Father, honest!!

But -- dammit, I hate that this is happening. I'm frustrated with all the time I spent with the downloading and uploading, and cutting and pasting. But this represents something deeper and metaphysical. Change is inevitable, and I doubt anyone has put up a website, something that doesn't necesssarily have anything to do with blogging or tweeting, just pages of stuff that they like and that's not necessarily updated with a comment about what they're thinking every half-hour, in at least half a decade. But GeoCities was one of the earliest networking ventures; its ideas paved the way for MySpace and then facebook, but those ideas of finding an online outlet for your creativity and using the 'Net to stay in touch with people you know are timeless ones, ideas I think we all share. Moreover, it represents, at least to me, one of the nascent WWW programs that I really wanted to use. I was just surfing the Web before GeoCities; with my "Waste Of Space" I planted a flag and said, Here's who am I am and what I like to do, hope you like me. GeoCities gave me enough confidence to eventually put up this blog.

And now it's gone. A part of my college days, my youth, when all was less bleak than it is now, is now gone, or will be as soon as Yahoo! makes good on its promise and deletes my site. I may have only cared about it once I was warned it was going to be taken away from me, and it really was embarrassing to have it up somewhere, juvenile musings, early-HTML code, gauche graphics and all. (Although I haven't been able to go to my website ever since I knew about GeoCities' planned end; whenever I go to it I get a page saying "Sorry, unused." See what I mean? It's like I didn't even exist.) But for 11 years, one month and one day, my "Waste Of Space" lived in some form, it was mine, and it was a link to my past. I now have to move on. Hopefully, if I get around to it, I'll be able to find something similar -- not a blogging site, but a hosting service, a place where I can create informational pages and stuff that can just stay about there without a lot of tinkering. But if I can't find that, I just might put it in blog form. Then it'll be around forever ... at least until Blogger shuts down.